Dark Harvest

Every year, on Halloween, the local teen boys of a certain age must hunt down and confront a legendary pumpkin-headed supernatural spectre, known as Ol’ Sawtooth Jack, and kill it before it kills them.

In 1963, in an average small town in the American Midwest, there’s a Harvest ritual.

After a three day forced fast while locked in their rooms, the senior boys from the local high school are unleashed onto the nighttime streets like slavering dogs, clad in their Halloween costumes, to hunt down and kill the creature known as Ol’ Sawtooth Jack, a monster with a pumpkin for a head and a body full of candy, and stop it from reaching the town church at midnight. Jack will kill them, if he can, but almost every year ends the same, with the boys wildly beating the creature to death in the street, hollering and howling, and the boy actually responsible for bringing Jack down first devouring its heart, before the others rush in to consume the creature’s body, and the candy inside, in bloody fistfuls. This is how it must end, in order to ensure a good harvest and a year of peace and prosperity.

One year, Sawtooth Jack reached the church, and a massive cloud of black dust swallowed the town for three days, destroying the townspeople’s lives and livelihoods for nearly a decade.

The previous year, Ritchie’s older brother Jim won. Their family was from the wrong side of the tracks, but because Jim won, they got a big, brand new house and a bunch of money, and Jim himself drove off in the shiny new car with a pocket full of cash to see the world. His occasional postcards say he’s in California now, or maybe New Orleans, but no one seems to actually know for sure. The next year, because Jim won, Ritchie doesn’t have to join the Ritual, called “The Run,” but he has volunteered anyway, because Ritchie only wants one thing in the entire world… to get the hell out of this weirdly isolated little town, and killing ol’ Sawtooth Jack is the only way that’s gonna happen. Meanwhile, Kelly is the new girl in town. Both of her parents are dead, and now she’s moved back to their former home town to live with an aunt, the only black girl in a white small town’s high school in 1960s middle America, so she wants to leave town too, and sees killing Sawtooth Jack is her way out as well, even though girls aren’t allowed to join The Run. Ritchie and Kelly team up to kill Ol’ Sawtooth Jack in the hopes of getting out of a place that only wants them dead.

Based off the novel of the same name by Norma Partridge, this is overall a well-filmed and good-looking time. A fun little horror film, there’s tons of good gore, just buckets of blood really, with a couple of absolute showstopper effects. Good stuff all around, as it should be, as this is the primary reason you would watch something like this. Plus, some of the misogynistic bigots in the film, an expected piece of anything set in a predominantly White small town in America, especially in the 60s, get the crap kicked out of them, so that’s good stuff too.

A story of teen angst and quiet desperation, what I really liked was that Dark Harvest is actually a metaphor for the toxic intersection of American traditions, the violent demands of masculinity, and the corrosive nature of organized religion, with the eventually revealed truth about Sawtooth Jack being a commentary on the evils of racism, classism, and silent complicity, as well as a statement on how the system can’t be reformed, that it can only be burned down and replaced with something completely new and different built in its place, but that your parents, your family, your friends and your neighbors, all these supposedly “good” people that you’ve known all your life, are dependent on that system, they love that system, it’s what they’ve always known, so they will fucking murder you if you try change anything.

The film doesn’t quite work, but it comes pretty close, close enough that it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for a new “bloody cornfield monster” Halloween movie to enjoy.

In the end, Dark Harvest is not only a pretty fun little Halloween gore fest, something my wife calls “the right amount of scary” which means “not scary at all really, it just has a few jump-scares and a bit of gore,” but it is also an impressively subtle, on-point, and well-deserved indictment of modern day White America, with an especially appreciated part where all the “socially conscious” White kids who refuse to take a side by simply not participating in The Run, are all slaughtered by the System’s monster in a geyser of blood.

(Chef’s kiss)

Perfect.